Inhaltsbereich

Hauptseminar: Green Energy Seminar – Overview

About the lecture

Time and place

Wednesdays 1:30pm - 3:00 pm CET, seminar room L204

Rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and the depletion of fossil fuel reserves raise serious concerns about the ensuing effects on the global climate and future energy supply. Utilizing the abundant solar energy to produce electricity or to drive artificial photosynthetic reaction to convert water and carbon dioxide into fuels are potential solutions to both energy harvesting and storage. The Seminar will cover four main topics. Firstly, the current status of the energy supply from non-renewable (fossil, nuclear) and renewable sources will be discussed in relation to sustainability, waste management, environmental effects and challanges to they impose on the grid architecture. The second part will cover solar cells: architecture, light harvesting, charge separation, efficiency limitations and new materials (including perovskite solar cells).

The third part will cover natural photosynthesis, in particular light harvesting and charge transport. The fourth part will focus on heterogeneous solar fuel generation with nanocrystalline semiconductor particles, starting from thermodynamic and kinetic aspects of photocatalysis, through photosensitization to semiconductor-based photocatalysts for hydrogen generation via water reduction, full water splitting and carbondioxide reduction. The architecture, limitations and figures of merit for photocatalytic and photoelectrocatalytic systems will also be discussed. This topic will also include plasmonic sensitization and hot electron injection mechanism for driving photocatalytic reactions.

The seminar addresses in particular master students which have followed the lecture EM1 - Advanced Solid State Physics, but is not exclusively for these students.

Additional topics

There will be an additional seminar on Wednesday, 28.06.2017 (tentative day, to be confirmed soon), which will start at 15:00 (shortly after the seminar with talks on topic 9). There will be 3-4 talks during the additional seminar.